Characterization of climatological time series using autoencoders

Abstract

Common problems in climatological time series data are high dimensionality, correlation between the sequential values and noise due to calibration of meteorological stations influencing dramatically in the quality of clustering, classification, climate pattern finding and data processing. One way to deal with this problem is through feature extraction technique. In order to extract features from large climatological time series data, we propose a feature extraction method based on autoencoder neural network (AUTOE). As a first step, time series is standardized. Then, different architectures of autoencoder is applied on it to reduce dimensionality. Finally, k-means clustering algorithm are used to evaluate them through quality measures. As a result, autoencoder performs well and is competitive with other feature extraction techniques over Synthetic Control Chart Time Series.